Selection of a President a Small Step Toward Deciding More Powerful Post of Prime Minister

By Nour Malas
Updated July 24, 2014 5:25 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD—Iraqi lawmakers elected a new president on Thursday, hours after an attack on a prisoner convoy just north of the capital left dozens dead in murky circumstances. The violence illustrated the challenges facing the country's politicians as they debate the thornier question of who will become prime minister.

Iraqi security officials said the convoy was escorting prisoners from a high-security prison in Al Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad, when it was attacked just after dawn. The area is populated mainly by Sunnis, and the prison's inmates are mostly Sunnis being held on terrorism charges.

In a separate incident, two car bombs ripped through Karrada, a usually bustling district in central Baghdad packed with shops and restaurants, as families gathered to break the Ramadan fast at dusk on Thursday. At least eight people were killed, and 34 wounded, a security official said.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's forces have stepped up security in Baghdad after militants from the Sunni radical group Islamic State, an al Qaeda spinoff, vowed to step up attacks around the capital as Ramadan ends next week. They have waged an offensive against Mr. Maliki's Shiite-led government in Iraq's north.

The insurgency has deepened tensions between the country's Sunnis and Shiites. But Iraqis on both sides largely blame the security forces for being unable to repel attacks. No one immediately claimed the latest bombing, but the Islamic State has claimed a wave of recent car bombs in Baghdad.

Amid the violence, parliament selected Fouad Massoum, an ethnic Kurd, as the country's new president. Mr. Massoum is a veteran Kurdish politician who served as speaker of parliament in the transitional government that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein and helped rewrite the country's constitution. Kurdish politicians described him as widely respected.

He succeeds Jalal Talabani, a close friend. The two were founding members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of two main parties dominating the Kurdish political scene in Iraq.

In Iraq, the president's post is largely ceremonial, but the choice of Mr. Massoum moves forward by a small step what has been an arduous process of forming a new government. The largest bloc in parliament, which is allied to Mr. Maliki, now has two weeks to choose the more powerful role of prime minister. The premier, whose bloc won elections in April, is seeking a third term.

But Mr. Maliki is seen as increasingly divisive since Islamic State fighters seized Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, on June 10 and quickly took control of large areas of northern and western Iraq.

According to an informal political pact, the president's post is held by a Kurd, the prime minister comes from the Shiite majority, and the speaker is a Sunni.

Tensions remained high after Thursday's violence. Iraqi officials gave conflicting accounts over the circumstances surrounding the attack on the prisoner convoy.

A spokesman for the Baghdad Military Operations Command said militants were attempting to free fellow rebels from the prison and shot at the convoy before at least two suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing 44 prisoners and wounding several soldiers who were escorting them.

"They had information the convoy would be moving, and they were targeting it," said the spokesman, Saad Maan, referring to the insurgents. Mr. Maan said a routine transfer of prisoners to another jail was under way at the time of the attack.

A security official put the prisoner death toll higher, at 60, and said eight members of the Iraqi security forces were wounded in the assault. The official said the convoy was moved out in response to an earlier attack on the area.

Sunni insurgents have long been active in Al Taji, and military checkpoints and bases there have frequently come under attack since Islamic State militants began their campaign last month. Al Taji prison last year was the site, along with the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, of a massive jail break coordinated by the Islamic State—then calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham—that freed hundreds of militants.

But Sunni insurgents and some lawmakers have accused the Maliki government of overseeing a prison system in which inmates, particularly those rounded up in mass arrests on terrorism charges, are regularly abused and summarily executed. The attacks on jails are meant to free them.

Muhammad Iqbal, a Sunni lawmaker, said he believes the convoy attack on Thursday wasn't by Sunni militants, but by the Shiite armed groups proliferating in and around Baghdad to fight alongside government forces.

"This was absolutely sectarian targeting," he said, adding he believed the government's inability to push back against the Sunni insurgency "is pushing some militias to carry out retaliation operations against Sunni prisoners."

— Safa Majeed contributed to this article.

At least it is all moving in the right direction.  Like a glacier, slow and steady, but still movement.

Yep ...